Published 4:00 am, Thursday, December 14, 2006

Most people worry about last-minute shopping. But if you're buying your holiday gifts online, you have to worry about last-minute shipping. And if you're anything like me, you're worried about both.

The good news here is that the fine folks at the Dealnews.com Web site have put together a great database of shipping dates that tell you when the last possible day is to order something online and get it under your Christmas tree in time.

Generally speaking, Dealnews says next Thursday will be the last day you can get guaranteed, on-time shipping from most sites -- a day they've dubbed Last-Minute Thursday. Big sites like Amazon and Best Buy can still get you the goods if you buy that day. Wal-Mart seems the least accommodating of the big names, with their drop-dead, last day being Wednesday.

Keep in mind that if you wait that long, you'll be paying much more for expedited shipping. Most places will stop offering free shipping or standard shipping as soon as Friday. As in TOMORROW!

StumbleUpon, a startup that adds some editing and recommendation services to cruising the Web, is offering a new video service.

Unlike the regular version of StumbleUpon, you don't even need to register or download a toolbar (although you can). What you can do, though, is click on "stumble" and see a video that other stumblers have given a thumbs up.

"It's hard to find good video on the Internet," StumbleUpon founder Garrett Camp said. Camp built the site with some colleagues as a grad student in Calgary, before some Silicon Valley types stumbled upon his site, invested in it, and moved him to San Francisco. "You can do a YouTube search for humor and find 100,000 videos. You can search for cats and find 10,000 videos."

As he demonstrated the new service, an intriguing clip of elephants swimming played on the screen, ears flapping Dumbo-like in the brine. "You'd never search for elephants swimming," he said.

StumbleUpon uses collaborative filtering, which is just a geeky way of saying it figures out what you like, and delivers it to you, based on what other people like. Amazon.com does a similar thing with book recommendations. On StumbleUpon, as people rate videos, the ratings go into a database. Then, as you rate videos, the service will know what you like and don't like, and which users have similar taste. It continually refines that information to serve up videos that it believes will match the stuff you like.

"You can stumble, rate and review, and it's constantly learning and getting you better videos," said David Feller, the vice president of marketing.

StumbleUpon makes money by slipping ads in the Web sites people are stumbling upon; it is not selling ads yet on the new service.

Forrester Research has received a lot of attention for its report on iTunes sales, which, among its findings, included this tidbit: Since January 2006, the number of monthly transactions declined 58 percent, while transaction size fell 17 percent, leading to a 65 percent overall drop in monthly iTunes revenue. With only two years of full data, it is too soon to tell if this decline was seasonal or if buyers were reaching their saturation level for digital music.

Apple's stock dipped Tuesday as news of the report spread, and a lot of heated discussion ensued.

John Bernoff, the Forrester analyst who wrote the report, had this to say on his blog: "What an interesting couple of days it's been. What follows is a case study in how information -- and misinformation -- spreads on the Net. ... Now for the record, iTunes sales are not collapsing. Our credit card transaction data shows a real drop between the January post-holiday peak and the rest of the year, but with the number of transactions we counted it's simply not possible to draw this conclusion ... as we pointed out in the report. But that point was just too subtle to get into these articles. ... Now, you can't unring the bell. But I will try to focus you on the truth here, which is this: iTunes sales are leveling off, the Journal did an article about it last Friday with data from Soundscan. Apple is not in trouble -- it makes its money mostly from iPods, and iTunes is just a way to make that experience better."

Gene Munster, an analyst at PiperJaffray, issued his take based on company data: "Contrary to recent reports suggesting sales on iTunes are declining rapidly, our analysis of Apple company data regarding iTunes sales shows strong growth."

He said total sales between January and September 2005 and the same period this year showed 78 percent growth. In 2005, Apple sold 10.4 million songs per week and in 2006 that number was 18.5 million.

So readers, your thoughts? How many songs have you purchased on iTunes?